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This paper analyzes and discusses the potential and limits of using Facebook data to analyse spatial-temporal urban rhythms and city centrality through the availability of services and retail. During September 2020, we harvested Facebook Places data using Graph API for our pilot area consisting in the city of Brno. Specifically, we focused on the spatial distribution of 'Food & Beverage', 'Shopping & Retail' and 'Medical & Health' categories, and their associated opening hours. The paper provides a detailed description of data collection and post-processing among possible analysis methods and visualizations presented in the context of our case study. The study focuses on inter-urban structures and urban rhythms through the analysis of opening hours of retail and services. We also discuss the benefits and potential problems associated with the use of these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daily rhythmical patterns in the city are investigated in depth in this paper. The city is conceptualised here as a cyclical process and described by a sequence of relatively stable spatial-temporal stages. The concept of a chronotope is incorporated in the analysis of retail opening hours in the middle-sized city of Brno (Czech Republic), in order to identify distinct fusions of specific times and specific retail places and to examine their position within the daily rhythms of the city. There are distinct time-space retail configurations (chronotopes), which play crucial roles in the social negotiation and imagination of basic temporal categories, such as early morning, late morning, lunchtime, afternoon, evening, as being taken-for-granted in the urban context. More generally, the paper offers an example of the ways in which the specific daily rhythms of the city are produced and structured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of deregulating weekday shop opening hours on employment in retailing. Using administrative data on all German food shops, a difference-in-differences analysis shows that relaxing restrictions on opening hours raised employment by 0.4 workers per shop corresponding to an increase by 4%. This effect is driven by part-time employment and employment in large shops, and it implies an increase by 0.1 workers per additional actual weekly opening hour. While the wage bill increased by less than employment, the deregulation seems not to have reduced earnings of workers already employed in retailing before the deregulation. ( JEL J23, L51, L81) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]